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Brain, one clumsy owner, for sale

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Go on, I’ll throw in a kidney too since it’s the January sales. I’ve just had enough of living with this miserable bastard in my skull. It sits there judging me and everyone around me while doing next to nothing to improve the situation. Nothing and nobody is good enough for my brain. But the worst thing of all is the way it attacks itself.

I hear myself, day after day, finding fault in the world yet never once offering praise or cause for celebration. The ever-deepening darkness in which I live is sucking the fun out of all my life. There is hardly anything I find pleasure in and it’s obviously to all around me that I’ve stopped caring about most things.

I used to enjoy life on the whole. Yes I was always slightly cynical and sarcastic, but I wanted to have fun and be involved with others. Now I’m becoming a more introverted and angry person – as if the world is at fault for the chemical imbalance in my head. Or worse: I am. Just because we are made in a certain way doesn’t mean we have to accept it, but it gets harder to do that when you have forgotten who you were in the first place.

I see photos of a younger me, a smiling me and wonder where he has gone. Hopes, ambitions and possibilities instead of the dark thoughts that live there now.

What are the options though? More tablets? Well another trip to the madhouse next week may see an increase in the meds to help but the black dog has been visiting more and more regularly of late and I’m finding it harder to shake it off. Extra chemicals be the answer possibly in the short-term but if my decline continues as it has for the last decade then we’re in for very difficult times.

You are asked the question “Have you had any thoughts about harming yourself or suicidal thoughts?” when you go the consultant, and the answer is no. But it’s not that straight forward. It’s less that you want to die, more that you don’t want to live at times. If I could go to sleep and wake up once the fug has passed then I’d sign up to that tomorrow. But I can’t. I don’t want to hurt myself – but I am hurting myself and causing pain in others because of the Bipolar disorder.

The lost tempers, raised voice, sarcasm turned up to 11 all impact on those I love the most. The bleak outlook, negative attitude and lack of self-belief turned in on myself is eating away at me and any positives there is left in me. I’ve become a different person in the last dozen years and I don’t want to lose who I was – it’s like a form of dementia and I’m being removed from my own story and replaced by a less likable, less tolerant version of myself.

Each time the wave of misery hits, it erodes my personality. I worry that in another ten years I will be so far removed from the person I was that I’ll lose all I hold dear. That’s the fear that accompanies depression – worst case scenarios. The anti-Midas: everything you touch turns to shit. There must be a way out, a secret passage or incantation I can use to fix it – hell, zap me with ECT if you need to, but get this fucking thing out of my head before I’m too far gone to come back.